This invention relates to clustering of data items. More specifically, the invention relates to discovering communities from disparate data items and providing a multi-dimensional analysis of the discovered communities and associated data items.
With the rapid development of online social network and collaboration systems, social connection among people is on the rise. Either for personal use or business use, social media has become a ubiquitous tool for daily social communication. Social media comes in different forms, and generally consists of documents shared among two or more people. For example, an update may be created by a person and broadcast to friends or followers through a social connection platform.
One task in social network analysis includes identification of an underlying community structure. A community may be in the form of a group of people who are closely linked in a social network, or those who share common interests, but do not necessarily interact directly with each other. Current formations of social linkages among virtual communities are limited. More specifically, such formations are two dimensional and limited to a collapsed evaluation of relationships by calculating an existence or strength between any two entities.